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COVID is bigger than anything I write about here, but there are still interesting things happening. Stay at home and catch up on your reading.

COVID and forced experiments. In January, everyone was online, and probably willing to try anything online. Now we don’t have a choice - we’re shut indoors for weeks or months. What does that means for work? Ecommerce? Health and education? And the people left behind? Link

🗞 News

Smartphone virus tracking: Apple and Google announced a joint project to implement low-power Bluetooth-based virus contact-tracing into iOS and Android. The architecture is pretty interesting: Apple & Google add the underlying APIs, and health agencies make apps to use it and persuade us to install those aps. Then, the app on your phone will pass a randomised anonymous key (which will change many times a day) to all other phones running the app within a few yards of you, wherever you are (and vice versa). If, after a few weeks, you test positive, you tell the app (presumably with medical verification), which tells a central cloud service, and every other phone in the region checks the keys they've seen in the last 14 days against that service, and if there's a match they can say 'you've been exposed'. If done right, this is anonymous and automatic. Of course, you need a way to keep out hoaxers, and it would be a lot more useful if you also link to efficient testing. Link

Remote medicine has made a decade of progress in a week - here in the UK. I wonder (as I wrote in my blog post above) how much of this  sticks once this is all over - partly the human behaviour but also the shifts in bureaucracy and institutional process to let people move this fast. Link

Quibi launched: a $1.8bn bet on Hollywood-quality mobile video from Jeffrey Katzenberg, with a 90 day free trial and 1.7m downloads in the first week. Thoughts: 1: this is a total un-Silicon Valley way to do things - betting billions before any contact with the customer, and going for a huge fully-formed product rather than experimenting and iterating. 2: It's also (as I've also argued about Netflix) a TV company, not a tech company in any way - all of the tech has to be good, but that's just a condition of entry. The questions that determine success are all LA questions, not SV questions. 3: the tech is pretty good - a UI that's different enough to be distinctive and drive the flow of different atoms of content, without being so different that you need to be in the know to get it (the Snapchat problem). I don't know if it will work, but neither does anyone else. Link

Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO and co-founder of Square, will donate $1bn towards the virus effort. Link 

🔮 Reading

Schools are going online, but the low-income children may not be able to. Link

The UK courts have moved almost all business to video calls. Link

Remote courts: a resource for justice systems going remote. Link

How Chinese state media tries to shape conversations on the virus. Link

Fashion photographers and creatives are all freelance, which means they're in trouble now. Link

Podcast interview with Jeffrey Katzenberg on Quibi. Link

BBC story on remote sex workers. Link

video game sales during the virus. Link

Hollywood agents sign up influencers. Link

Classical music’s streaming moment. Link

The rise of the virtual gallery tour: what works and what doesn’t. Link

😮 Interesting things

A 1955 film about that year's Mille Miglia race. Link

Bored working from home? Here are the sounds of a 1964 office. Link

The French airforce gave a retiring contractor a joyride in a fighter. He accidentally ejected. It gets better. Link

📊 Stats

Moovit's Public Transit Index. Link

Ofcom study on how the UK gets news on the virus - social versus the BBC. Link

Google Meet is doing 2bn minutes of calls a day. Link

And Microsoft Teams is doing close to 3bn. Link

Summary of Piper's annual survey of US teens. Link

Useful collection of virus impact charts from Luke Wroblewski. Link

Comprehensive global McKinsey survey of consumer sentiment, economic expectations and use of new services since the virus hit. Link